Q&A
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about Circular-C's general approach.
Today, many construction materials, particularly wood-based panels, still rely on ingredients derived from fossil fuels and often contain toxic substances that are harmful to humans and the environment. These materials are also difficult to handle safely at the end of their life cycle. These chemical substances are not typically designed to be disassembled, reused or recycled. Circular-C aims to change this by developing safer, more sustainable materials that are better suited to a circular economy.
One of the biggest challenges in recycling wood panels is fibre contamination caused by adhesives. The adhesives and coatings commonly used are non-reversible formulations. This makes it very difficult to separate wood fibres from chemical substances once a product has reached the end of its life. Consequently, recycling is often limited, and incineration is still commonly used instead. Circular-C addresses this challenge by developing materials and formulations that facilitate disassembly, reuse, and remanufacturing.
Circular-C goes beyond simply replacing one material with another. We are developing a new generation of circular, bio-based adhesives, coatings, and functionalised fibres for applications such as flooring, furniture, and insulation panels. Our approach is unique in that we combine renewable raw materials, reversible chemical bonds, improved recyclability and digital tools that help to track materials throughout their life cycle. Developing a digital product passport enables better material performance and more circularity from the start by the provision of relevant information for acteurs along the whole value chain.
In Circular-C, a Digital Product Passport is a tool that helps make materials and products more transparent across their entire life cycle. It can provide important information on topics such as composition, safety, lifecycle data, assembly and reassembly, and the best end-of-life options. This matters because better information can help manufacturers, users, and recyclers make more informed decisions, and it can support better reuse, recycling, and trust in circular products.
Our ambition is to help make construction materials safer, more circular, and less harmful to the climate. Circular-C aims to reduce the use of hazardous chemicals and cut greenhouse gas emissions compared with fossil-based counterparts. At the same time, we want to contribute to products that are durable, transparent, and designed with health, sustainability, and quality of life in mind.
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about Circular-C's products.
We are developing material solutions and component formulations, not finished consumer end products. These include high-strength functionalised cellulosic materials, thermoset adhesives, thermoreversible adhesives, and reversible coatings with high bio-based content and improved circularity. Our formulations draw on lignin, furfural, and maleic anhydride, while our coating routes include phosphorylated micro- and nanocellulose and a lignin–nanocellulose hybrid with tailored properties.
Circular-C does not aim to produce or market finished end products itself. Instead, we focus on developing circular materials, components, and formulations such as functionalised fibres, adhesives, coatings, and non-PU foam-related material solutions. We then validate how these materials perform in relevant application contexts such as floor panels, furniture panels, and insulation panels under real-world manufacturing conditions. This allows us to assess recyclability, disassembly, fire resistance, low emissions, and other performance criteria in realistic usage scenarios, and to subsequently supply manufacturers with the described components.
In Circular-C, we explore what can happen to recycled material streams after disassembly and recycling. Higher-quality recycled streams are assessed for reuse in fresh construction materials, while lower-quality streams are tested in moulded cellulose items, specialty papers, packaging, tissue paper, and graphic paper. We also examine thermal end-of-life routes such as combustion, pyrolysis, and gasification to understand how circularity can be maximised across the full lifecycle.
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about Circular-C's innovations in chemistry.
In Circular-C, lignocellulosic biomasses refers to sustainable, plant-based residues from agricultural, forestry and food production streams. These feedstocks contain the three key fractions we work with: cellulose, hemicellulose, and lignin. By separating these fractions, we create the building blocks for the circular material solutions developed in the project.
In Circular-C, the sugar-rich fraction of biomass is used as a starting point for sugar-derived chemicals. More specifically, we concentrate hemicellulose sugars into a syrup and convert them into furfural. This gives the sugar fraction an important role in our circular material-development pathway.
A key platform-chemical route in Circular-C centres on furfural. We produce furfural from hemicellulose-derived sugars and use it as an important renewable building block in our formulation work. We also work with maleic anhydride as part of the advanced chemical formulation pathway for circular adhesives.
Furanics are a group of bio-based chemical intermediates derived from lignocellulosic biomass. One important example is furfural. In Circular-C, furfural is especially relevant because it connects the biomass side of the project with the formulation side: it is obtained from hemicellulose sugars and used in developing circular adhesive systems.
